We are going to standardize our hands-on exercises on Aarch64 Linux, to
best accommodate everyone. It turns out that one can run arm64 (aka Aarch64)
virtual machines on x86 CPUs fairly efficiently regardless of the native OS,
but running x86 virtual machines on M1/M2/M3 CPUs is quite hard.

So if you are on an _x86_ ("Intel") machine, download Virtual Box or use another VM
that fully emulates the arm64 instruction set, and install Linux into it. I suggest
using Debian or Ubuntu for these installations, so that you could use the "apt"
Debian-based package manager to install new software.

If you are on an M1/M2/M3 Mac ("Apple Silicon"), you can download Multipass and have a
shell Linux Aarch64 running in minutes! Multipass has its own set of Linux OS images you
can download and install with its command-line utility "multipass".

https://multipass.run/docs/tutorial

https://www.virtualbox.org/
https://www.oracle.com/virtualization/technologies/vm/downloads/virtualbox-downloads.html

----

I wrote some explanations of how Multipass works on MacsOS if you are curious:
 https://cosc60.gitlab.io/howto/linux-virtual-machines.txt
(be warned that in the meantime the links on Multipass site have changed and may
 be broken).